Brown Study

To achieve the state of deep focus in which I do the writing that means the most to me, I have found I need a physical space separate from that space in which I "live" or anyway sleep-- a space, no matter how modest, dank or sweltering, that's dedicated only to my writing. Callooh, callay: I have one again. It's a little room I call The Brown Study, in a friend's basement the merest mile-and-a-half from my house. It underwent renovations the last several months, temporarily evicting me, but now it's back and I'm back in it.

I'm a princess, but not a prima donna; most things I can write as necessary under almost any circumstances. The exception is fiction. When it comes to my novels, I only seem able to get where I want to go via long sojourns in deep focus. Quidditatively, deep focus is very similar to the depths of depression, with the important difference that in one state I do the only thing I ever do of any positive value, and in the other I pray to die. In both, I "feel" myself emptied of nearly all consciousness; I visit interior abysses unfamiliar enough to seem ontologically external, and as with a napkin touching water, what those deep wells contain absorbs up into me and saturates me. The hollowness where self might more healthily reside becomes a vessel or conduit for this other, be it a story about people doing things or the roaring void of unlife. It is exhaustingly intense.

Laying this out, the mode I describe strikes me as hokey-- the "muse moves me" school of creative process-- but it really is how my best writing emerges. When I'm out of practice with serious writing, I use various combinations of drugs to pry open the trapdoors and silence the interior peanut gallery, but when I'm in a good creative run, the process of descent to deep focus becomes more routine; rather than taking pills to dull the distracting parts of my consciousness, I just play loud music on my headphones.

The output from these sustained spells of deep focus is so important to me that I ascribe supernatural significance to the production. Ritual brings into existence something I uncomprehendingly revere: it's sorcery. I burn incense, I light a special candle, I pull the curtains against the cheerful sun. There are parts of me that laugh at this, but if taking my writing seriously is what doing the writing I care most about requires, then it's a price I will pay without complaint.

The Gambit's blog ran a few of my interviews: with a zinester who wrote about Palestine, a filmmaker who documented the daily lives of North Louisiana born-agains, a tree-sit protestor trying to save New Orleans parkland from becoming golf course, and a pair of dudes who opened an undaground record store Uptown. A look at the pieces' respective Facebook "shares" -- 55 : 88 : 730 : 1877 -- makes clear which of these subjects the readership find more compelling, but I urge you to reach your own conclusions.

In service to my undimmed fanaticism for professional wrestling, I wrote an in-depth essay on the phenomenon of "heel heat" in rasslin's big league & indies for the twelfth issue of Classical Magazine, bolstered by lots of anecdote, including the time I got kicked out of the New Orleans Arena. My fave tag-team partner "Big" Benny Passmore drew a bunch of jerkface bad-guy wrestlers to go with this passionate polemic.

Now that I have a space in which to tackle a novel, I may excrete less of the shorter sort of writing, although one does need money, and this non-fiction shit does pay...